Microsoft® Windows® 2000 Security Handbook

A New Windows

It's been seven long years since the introduction of Microsoft Windows NT 3.1. I remember sitting in a presentation in Cleveland, Ohio, ooh-ing and aah-ing with the rest of the crowd as we watched Microsoft engineers demo the "new Windows." There were lots of things to be happy about—things that the Windows community had never seen before, such as true preemptive multitasking, built-in networking, and, most importantly, security. NT had user accounts. NT had resource-based permissions. NT had auditing.

This was a key milestone in the evolution of the Windows operating system. Before this point, even such basics as user accounts were just plain not available in Microsoft Windows. Novell and the various flavors of UNIX were your only ...